There is beauty in simplicity

What if this year would be a year of simplicity? My old friend Paul spent New Year’s Eve with us at home. “Let’s have a quick catch up on business before we have more fun with family and friends”, he told me. So did we start our conversation about marketing capabilities in his large multinational. Paul was observing that the organisation of his marketing department, the ways of working, the type of interactions with agencies, … were changing quickly and profoundly, thus turning himself and his peers into change agents at the expense of the role of business developers. He could sense that he was spending more time with counsultants and HR than he was with consumers, customers, institutes, agencies or media start ups. At the same time, business was tough, and a great pressure on market share and margins should have him deal more with business issues.

The large multinational he belongs to is made of multiple divisions. Brands are developed for global markets in a rather centralised way. The country hub he belongs to, one in the North of Europe, sees its business challenged by new types of discount retailers. E-commerce drives transboarder trade, with parrallel imports coming from the very low price neighbour-market. For him to address the root of the issue, he has to talk to no less than 3 senior leaders, one for the zone, one for the division, one for the cross division shared services. The matrix organisation he operates into has created another sub matrix resulting in a multiplication of structures also called “structural mitosis“, a term borrowed from biology to describe cellular division.

As a head of a country cluster, Paul is facing all the launches offered by the divisions to the region, each of them being “terribly strategic”, so they say. But when seen from the country perspective, the multiplication of top important launches becomes a long list of projects. He has to decide what to really prioritize. Put in another perspective, there is a bottleneck in the go to market strategy: the sales force can not take care of more than 3 highlights for each commercial cycles. Paul’s limited marketing team has to prepare numerous launches with sometimes complicated activation plans that keeps the team too busy. The proliferation of offers, each of them considered in one part of the organisation as a top priority, embolises (another medical term that describes the obstruction of blood vessel) the local marketing system.

When Paul gets to work with agencies and colleagues from other countries, he is always petrified when he hears the jargon of marketers. The same story is told again and again in different words. What was once called “communication strategy”, a very sound process to coordinate communication initiatives around a major brand idea, now becomes Integrated Marketing Communication. But “because the term is used in other multinationals, and we pretend that our marketing is so unique, we decided to call it differently: Integrated Communication Process”, so would Paul express his mind. And the reality behind the words is frequently undefined. The conceptual clarity of managers is very loose, resulting in people discussing issues, or even major problems, without speaking the same language. Paul would dream of consolidating the ways of working so that marketing managers would share concepts defined in the same way, guiding principles, and may be, processes.

As he left the office last Friday, Paul looked back at the week he had just gone through: Days full of meetings, back to back from 09:00 to 20:00. And he still had not answered all the emails received this day, an exercise he is used to practice until late in the evening, a PC on his lap and a movie on TV in the background. Next week, he thought will be the begining of the budget process, a detailed exercise that plans (overplans) everything as if the future would be linear and reliably predictable. He had a dream that his organisation would start to make decisions on how much details is enough.

Opening his computer after a short evening with friends, Paul read the invite of a good friend of him. Sarah is a marketing director that has just received the assignment of creating a marketing academy. She would love to have Paul facilitate a marketing programme, based on his great experience and success records. By the way, she also would like him to be part of her steering committee to revise the ways marketing is done nowadays “in an ever changing economy”, “with the new social media”, “bla, bla, bla”. Paul was starting to mentally push back. He would love to help and contribute to the larger marketing community, but he was starting to feel he was too busy to help. Though he is a great fan of collaborative relationships at work, he was dreaming of creating the empty space that would allow him to think again, and to have fun.

Concluding this conversation, I suggested: “What if 2017 would be a year of simplicity?” What if we would address the issue of organisational complexity attacking structural misotis, limiting seriously offerings proliferation, consolidating ways of working within guiding principles more than processes, so that people can feel empowered and engaged, making decisions on how much details is enough? It would be so beautiful!

Paul is obviously not the only one suffering from emboly. Many organisations around us are confronted with major non paradigmatic reorganisations also called “transformations”. We have seen in recent months many managers struggle about effective leadership in this change process. This is why we believe 2017 will have to be a year of simplicity.

In 2017, I wish you the beauty of simplicity.